


Finding Blue

by lettersfromnowhere



Category: Avatar: The Last Airbender
Genre: Angst, F/M, Make a Zutara Cry in Under 500 Words Challenge, Prophecies, this one is weird idk, time loops
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-12
Updated: 2020-09-12
Packaged: 2021-03-06 21:35:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 499
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26415766
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lettersfromnowhere/pseuds/lettersfromnowhere
Summary: He has always been cursed, after all.
Relationships: Katara/Zuko (Avatar)
Comments: 28
Kudos: 95
Collections: Zutara Angst Challenge





	Finding Blue

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this in fifteen minutes not knowing what I was doing or where I was going with it, so please bear with me.

_He will know naught but pain and escape not this bane_

_From the day that his eyes lock on blue;_

_For at every juncture his time will rewind_

_And the cycle begin anew._

He doesn’t know what the words mean when he first hears them. He is twelve, taken to the Sages who scatter his fortune on hardwood when they pour ashes from their great urns to the ground; he knows nothing of prophecies, nothing of pain, and all he knows is that his father’s face is pinched and displeased and the next day he is cast out.

Zuko roams a world that seems hostile at every turn after that; he seeks refuge where they can, hides where he cannot. He does not have friends, nor funds, nor food enough for a growing boy, but he runs, because he has no choice.

It takes eight years of this to find blue.

Their eyes lock across a market stall where he’s begun to brew tea to bolster his dwindling funds. She’s searching for a way to stop his father and their first encounter is one of the purest chance but as they run together, he foolishly forgets that nothing in his life has ever been accidental. But she is so far beyond fate, what he feels for her so far beyond possession by anyone or anything but _her,_ that he forgets.

Only when she shudders in his arms, body convulsing with a current it can’t bear, is he reminded by the guttural cry that her final breath draws from his lips that he is fate’s subordinate.

He blinks, then, and he’s at the tea shop once more.

They survive, this time. They vanquish his father, return home, and he lets himself tell her things – those lovely, soft things he wouldn’t have known he was capable of thinking before he found blue. She captures his heart with beautiful effortlessness, he captures her lips in soft, stolen kisses –

And assassins capture her, aged seventeen, and he wakes up once more in the market. 

He knows where the assassins will find her this time. They come of age, he carves a necklace; she is his, _finally,_ and again, he forgets.

He forgets, in his delirious joy when she tells him her secret, that they are not safe, and when her hour comes it does not occur to him that this labor could be her last.

This time, a baby’s cries ring out in tandem with her mother’s last breath, and he does not cry, for he knows the clock will be reset. He will be granted as many chances as it takes, he knows, to live a life with her, and it will be full and rich and beautiful-

But the nurse places his daughter in his arms and when he blinks, he’s right where he stood a second ago, and she lies still at his side.

This must be, he thinks, the bitter end towards which they’ve been rushing all these years. 


End file.
